From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse
studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to
analyzing written, spoken or signed language use.
Discourse analysis is the branch of linguistics that deals with
the study and application of approaches to analyse written, spoken
or signed language.
The objects of discourse analysis—discourse, writing, talk, conversation, communicative event, etc.—are variously
defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences, propositions, speech
acts or turns-at-talk. Contrary to much of
traditional linguistics, discourse analysts not only study language
use 'beyond the sentence boundary', but also prefer to analyze
'naturally occurring' language use, and not invented examples. This
is known as corpus linguistics; text
linguistics is related.
Discourse analysis has been taken up in a variety of social science disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, social work, cognitive
psychology, social psychology, international relations, human
geography, communication studies and translation
studies, each of which is subject to its own assumptions,
dimensions of analysis, and methodologies. Sociologist Harold
Garfinkel was another influence on the discipline: see below.
History
The term discourse analysis (DA) first came into
general use following the publication of a series of papers by Zellig Harris
beginning in 1952 and reporting on work from which he developed transformational grammar in
the late 1930s. Formal equivalence relations among the sentences of
a coherent discourse are made explicit by using sentence
transformations to put the text in a canonical form. Words and
sentences with equivalent information then appear in the same
column of an array. This work progressed over the next four decades
(see references) into a science of sublanguage analysis (Kittredge &
Lehrberger 1982), culminating in a demonstration of the
informational structures in texts of a sublanguage of science, that
of immunology, (Harris et al. 1989) and a fully articulated theory
of linguistic informational content (Harris 1991). During this
time, however, most linguists pursued a succession of elaborate
theories of sentence-level syntax and semantics.
Although Harris had mentioned the analysis of whole discourses, he
had not worked out a comprehensive model, as of January, 1952. A
linguist working for the American Bible Society, James A.
Lauriault/Loriot, needed to find answers to some fundamental errors
in translating Quechua, in the Cuzco area of Peru. He took Harris's
idea, recorded all of the legends and, after going over the meaning
and placement of each word with a native speaker of Quechua, was
able to form logical, mathematical rules that transcended the
simple sentence structure. He then applied the process to another
language of Eastern Peru, Shipibo. He taught the theory in Norman,
Oklahoma, in the summers of 1956 and 1957 and entered the
University of Pennsylvania in the interim year. He tried to publish
a paper Shipibo Paragraph Structure, but it was delayed
until 1970 (Loriot & Hollenbach 1970). In the meantime, Dr.
Kenneth L. Pike, a professor at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
taught the theory, and one of his students, Robert E. Longacre, was
able to disseminate it in a dissertation.
Harris's methodology was developed into a system for the
computer-aided analysis of natural language by a team led by Naomi
Sager at NYU,
which has been applied to a number of sublanguage domains, most
notably to medical informatics. The software for the Medical Language Processor is publicly available
on SourceForge.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, and without reference to this prior
work, a variety of other approaches to a new cross-discipline of DA
began to develop in most of the humanities and social sciences
concurrently with, and related to, other disciplines, such as semiotics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. Many of these
approaches, especially those influenced by the social sciences,
favor a more dynamic study of oral talk-in-interaction.
Mention must also be made of the term "Conversational analysis",
which was influenced by the Sociologist Harold garfinkel who is the
founder of Ethnomethodology.
In Europe, Michel Foucault became one of the key
theorists of the subject, especially of discourse, and wrote The Archaeology of
Knowledge.
Topics of
interest
Topics of discourse analysis include:
- The various levels or dimensions of discourse, such as sounds (intonation, etc.), gestures,
syntax, the lexicon, style, rhetoric, meanings, speech
acts, moves, strategies, turns and other aspects of interaction
- Genres
of discourse (various types of discourse in politics, the media,
education, science, business, etc.)
- The relations between discourse and the emergence of
syntactic structure
- The relations between text (discourse) and context
- The relations between discourse and power
- The relations between discourse and interaction
- The relations between discourse and cognition and memory
Perspectives
The following are some of the specific theoretical perspectives
and analytical approaches used in linguistic discourse
analysis:
Although these approaches emphasize different aspects of
language use, they all view language as social interaction, and are
concerned with the social contexts in which discourse is
embedded.
Often a distinction is made between 'local' structures of
discourse (such as relations among sentences, propositions, and
turns) and 'global' structures, such as overall topics and the
schematic organization of discourses and conversations. For
instance, many types of discourse begin with some kind of global
'summary', in titles, headlines, leads, abstracts, and so on.
Prominent discourse
analysts
Robert de Beaugrande, Jan Blommaert, Adriana Bolivar, Carmen
Rosa Caldas-Coulthard, Wallace Chafe, Paul Chilton, Guy Cook,
Malcolm Coulthard, Paul Drew, Alessandro Duranti, Brenton D.
Faber, Norman Fairclough, James Paul Gee,
Talmy Givón,
Charles Goodwin, Art Graesser, Michael Halliday, Zellig Harris, John Heritage,
Janet Holmes, Paul
Hopper, Gail
Jefferson, Barbara Johnstone, Walter Kintsch, Richard
Kittredge, Adam Jaworski, William Labov, George Lakoff, Stephen H. Levinson, James
A. Lauriault/Loriot, Robert E. Longacre, Jim Martin, Elinor Ochs,
Jonathan
Potter, Harvey
Sacks, Naomi Sager, Emanuel Schegloff, Deborah Schiffrin,
Michael
Schober, Stef Slembrouck, Michael Stubbs, John Swales, Deborah Tannen,
Sandra Thompson, Teun A. van
Dijk, Theo van Leeuwen, Jef Verschueren, Henry
Widdowson, Carla Willig, Ruth Wodak, Michel Foucault, Margaret
Wetherell, Ernesto Laclau,Chantal Mouffe, Judith M. De Guzman
Further
reading
- Blommaert, J. (2005). Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
- Brown, G., and George Yule (1983). Discourse Analysis.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Carter, R. (1997). Investigating English Discourse.
London: Routledge.
- Gee, J. P.
(2005). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and
Method. London: Routledge.
- Harris, Zellig S. (1952a). "Culture and Style in Extended
Discourse". Selected Papers from the 29th International
Congress of Americanists (New York, 1949), vol.III: Indian
Tribes of Aboriginal America ed. by Sol Tax & Melville J[oyce]
Herskovits, 210-215. New York: Cooper Square Publishers. (Repr.,
New York: Cooper Press, 1967. Paper repr. in 1970a,
pp. 373-389.) [Proposes a method for analyzing extended
discourse, with example analyses from Hidatsa, a Siouan language
spoken in North Dakota.]
- Harris, Zellig S. (1952b.) "Discourse Analysis".
Language 28:1.1-30. (Repr. in The Structure of
Language: Readings in the philosophy of language ed. by Jerry
A[lan] Fodor & Jerrold J[acob] Katz, pp. 355-383.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964, and also in Harris
1970a, pp. 313-348 as well as in 1981, pp. 107-142.)
French translation "Analyse du discours". Langages (1969)
13.8-45. German translation by Peter Eisenberg, "Textanalyse".
Beschreibungsmethoden des amerikanischen Strakturalismus
ed. by Elisabeth Bense, Peter Eisenberg & Hartmut Haberland,
261-298. München: Max Hueber. [Presents a method for the analysis
of connected speech or writing.]
- Harris, Zellig S. 1952c. "Discourse Analysis: A sample text".
Language 28:4.474-494. (Repr. in 1970a,
pp. 349-379.)
- Harris, Zellig S. (1954.) "Distributional Structure".
Word 10:2/3.146-162. (Also in Linguistics Today:
Published on the occasion of the Columbia University
Bicentennial ed. by Andre Martinet & Uriel Weinreich,
26-42. New York: Linguistic Circle of New York, 1954. Repr. in
The Structure of Language: Readings in the philosophy of
language ed. by Jerry A[lan] Fodor & Jerrold J[acob] Katz,
33-49. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964, and also in
Harris 1970.775-794, and 1981.3-22.) French translation "La
structure distributionnelle,". Analyse distributionnelle et
structurale ed. by Jean Dubois & Françoise Dubois-Charlier
(=Langages, No.20), 14-34. Paris: Didier / Larousse.
- Harris, Zellig S. (1963.) Discourse Analysis Reprints.
(= Papers on Formal Linguistics, 2.) The Hague: Mouton, 73 pp.
[Combines Transformations and Discourse Analysis Papers 3a, 3b, and
3c. 1957, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. ]
- Harris, Zellig S. (1968.) Mathematical Structures of
Language. (=Interscience Tracts in Pure and Applied
Mathematics, 21.) New York: Interscience Publishers John Wiley
& Sons). French translation Structures mathématiques du
langage. Transl. by Catherine Fuchs. (=Monographies de
Linguistique mathématique, 3.) Paris: Dunod, 248 pp.
- Harris, Zellig S. (1970.) Papers in Structural and
Transformational Linguistics. Dordrecht/ Holland: D. Reidel.,
x, 850 pp. [Collection of 37 papers originally published
1940-1969.]
- Harris, Zellig S. (1981.) Papers on Syntax. Ed. by
Henry Hiż. (=Synthese Language Library, 14.) Dordrecht/Holland: D.
Reidel, vii, 479 pp.]
- Harris, Zellig S. (1982.) "Discourse and Sublanguage".
Sublanguage: Studies of language in restricted semantic
domains ed. by Richard Kittredge & John Lehrberger,
231-236. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
- Harris, Zellig S. (1985.) "On Grammars of Science".
Linguistics and Philosophy: Essays in honor of Rulon S.
Wells ed. by Adam Makkai & Alan K. Melby (=Current Issues
in Linguistc Theory, 42), 139-148. Amsterdam & Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
- Harris, Zellig S. (1988a) Language and Information.
(=Bampton Lectures in America, 28.) New York: Columbia University
Press, ix, 120 pp.
- Harris, Zellig S. 1988b. (Together with Paul Mattick, Jr.)
"Scientific Sublanguages and the Prospects for a Global Language of
Science". Annals of the American Association of Philosophy and
Social Sciences No.495.73-83.
- Harris, Zellig S. (1989.) (Together with Michael Gottfried,
Thomas Ryckman, Paul Mattick, Jr., Anne Daladier, Tzvee N. Harris
& Suzanna Harris.) The Form of Information in Science:
Analysis of an immunology sublanguage. Preface by Hilary
Putnam. (=Boston Studies in the Philosophy of, Science, 104.)
Dordrecht/Holland & Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, xvii,
590 pp.
- Harris, Zellig S. (1991.) A Theory of Language and
Information: A mathematical approach. Oxford & New York:
Clarendon Press, xii, 428 pp.; illustr.
- Jaworski, A. and Coupland, N. (eds). (1999). The Discourse
Reader. London: Routledge.
- Johnstone, B. (2002). Discourse analysis. Oxford:
Blackwell.
- Kittredge, Richard & John Lehrberger. (1982.) Sublanguage:
Studies of language in restricted semantic domains. Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter.
- Loriot, James and Barbara E. Hollenbach. 1970. "Shipibo
paragraph structure." Foundations of Language 6: 43-66. The seminal
work reported as having been admitted by Longacre and Pike. See
link below from Longacre's student Daniel L. Everett.
- Longacre, R.E. (1996). The grammar of discourse. New
York: Plenum Press.
- Miscoiu, S., Craciun O., Colopelnic, N. (2008). Radicalism,
Populism, Interventionism. Three Approaches Based on Discourse
Theory. Cluj-Napoca: Efes.
- Renkema, J. (2004). Introduction to discourse studies.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
- Sager, Naomi & Ngô Thanh Nhàn. (2002.) "The computability
of strings, transformations, and sublanguage". The Legacy of
Zellig Harris: Language and information into the 21st Century,
Vol. 2: Computability of language and computer applications, ed. by
Bruce Nevin, John Benjamins, pp. 79-120.
- Schiffrin, D., Deborah Tannen, & Hamilton, H. E.
(eds.). (2001). Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford:
Blackwell.
- Stubbs, M. (1983). Discourse Analysis: The sociolinguistic
analysis of natural language. Oxford: Blackwell
- Teun A.
van Dijk, (ed). (1997). Discourse Studies. 2 vols.
London: Sage.
- Potter, J, Wetherall, M. (1987). Discourse and Social
Psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour. London: SAGE.
External
links
See also
External
links
- Daniel L. Everett, statement concerning James Loriot [1] p. 9.
Top topics
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
